A quick orthographic note before moving onto the key grammar point—in line 6, the basic course uses a novel character formed of a 口 radical plus 宕 to indicate dọng as in dọng mạn, which I prefer to transcribe as 昨晚. (Intrestingly enough, the transcription on page 82 is dok instead of dọng, as the character would suggest.)

V + Object + V得 + Adj

In the dialogue for lesson 18, I pointed out three examples from the text of how to make phrases in Taishanese that correspond to adverbs in English. I’ve repasted the examples below, which use the verbs 講 gōng, 教 gau and 讀 ùk.

To recap from the previous lesson, where English follows the general pattern of VERB + ADJECTIVE + “-ly” (more or less), Taishanese uses the construction of VERB + 得 ak + ADJECTIVE. Importantly, 得 ak must be immediately next to the verb. I’ll refer to the requirement that the verb and 得 ak be adjacent as the “adjacency requirement.”

In the examples above, the verbs appear without an object. But when the verb is followed by an object, where do we put 得 ak?

The solution is to repeat the verb at the end of the phrase and to place 得 ak after the repeated verb, as in the examples below from the current dialogue.

According to the adjacency requirement, we would expect to see 得 ak between 行 häng and 慢 màn. I have no personal intuition as to why this is the case. I hope some of my more knowledgable (not to mention more thoughtful) readers can provide some input on this. What do you think?

As always, if you see a correction that needs to be made—or have any other thoughts you’d like to share—please let me know in the comments section below!

I’m wondering if the difference for 忙 has to do with different classes of adverbs. There’s some work on this done by Gennaro Chierchia; the distinction here would be that 忙 is more oriented toward the subject than the verb phrase. This hypothesis could probably be easily tested with other similar types of adverbs. I’ll have to keep thinking about it. Thank you for your comment, Stephen!

I have not considered this in any detail but here's my new thought. 得's usage here as an auxiliary syllable is derived from its free standing morpheme meaning 'ability' so it retains this meaning somewhat. As a result, in this structure, if it has the 'capability' flavor it would sound more natural. We can put this to a 'capability' test:

He has the ability to 'speak Taishanese well'He has the ability to 'teach extraordinarily well'He does not have the ability to 'do business well'He has the ability to 'write Chinese characters beautifully'

But the 'capability' test:He has the ability to 'study busily' does not make any sense.